Berkeley’s more than 10,000 graduate students make their academic homes in programs that run the gamut from African American Studies to Statistics, from German to Public Policy. With so many students and such a diversity of interests, the variety of graduate research projects on campus is staggering. This week we’re announcing a new feature: once a month we’ll report on research being done by graduate and professional students in different departments around campus that relates to a common theme.
The first theme is fire, which seems fitting for a California fall.
Each year as the summer draws to a close, thousands of Californians flock to the Black Rock Desert for Burning Man, an event that always culminates in flames. At the same time, after months with no rain, fire danger is high across the state and wildfires are a common occurrence. These events hint at the potential scope of fire-related research agendas, which might include fire as art, fire as ecological process, or the tools for managing fire on the ground or in the halls of government. As an introduction to the various ways Berkeley graduate students have chosen to investigate fire, the blog will present four graduate student research projects over the next four days. Tomorrow, forest fires!
